Coffee Creek Quality

 
One-minute excerpt of S5E1 of Schitt's Creek, a fair-use clip for educational purposes. May be blocked in some locations; may not be used on monetized sites.

"Coffee Movie!" or "Library Movie!" are expressions we use in the Hayes-Boh household to express our joy when encountering our favorite subjects in a film or a television show. A fantasy sabbatical project of mine, for example, would be to string together all of the coffee references in M*A*S*H; my favorite librarian even has a television tag for entries in her famous "Library" Books blog.

Our pandemic television roster now includes Schitt's Creek, a series to which we are late arrivals. The low-brow veneer covers some rather clever humor in a series that is essentially an inversion of The Beverly Hillbillies. Some scenes are set in a café, but the one that caught our attention takes place in the lobby of the very modest motel that is more central to the series. 

John first mentions coffee as nothing more than a caffeine vehicle -- fuel for a tired person. Stevie tries to discourage him, suggesting that even his low expectations of quality will not be met. 

Coffee quality matters, even when expectations are low. Coffee passes through 50 or more steps from seed to cup, and choices at each step affect quality. Sometimes I can tell that nearly every step went awry.

On June 26 of this year, I was pleased to be part of a wide-ranging discussion of coffee quality with two worker-owners of one of my favorite coffee companies: Equal Exchange. This was a public presentation via Zoom, for citizen-consumers all over the United States. If you have not already seen it, I invite you to watch the archive video, as we talk about the positive correlation between the relationships with farmers and the final quality in the cup. 

I provide links and put the discussion in context with two separate blog posts -- Fair Trade on my Aw, Professor blog and Micro Quality on this one. 

Micro Quality

I was pleased to be part of an online discussion of coffee quality recently -- specifically about the connections between cupping quality and the quality of life for the people who grow the coffee. The short version: better quality is good for producers.  Feel free to watch the long version of our discussion, entitled Our Version of the Perfect Cup, and to read about the context of that conversation.

This discussion was part of an ongoing series of educational events organized by the Equal Exchange Action Forum, the citizen-consumer arm of the fair-trade company. Equal is known for its leadership in coffee, but now sells cocoa, tea, cashews, and other products on behalf of small farmers throughout the world. The Action Forum allows its customers to think deeply about the entire food system and to collaborate on making it healthier and fairer for people and the planet.

A central premise of our discussion is that higher quality in the coffee itself is associated with the development of producer communities. It also reflects one of the principle benefits of the entire fair-trade movement in my view: greater transparency and better connections between those who produce food (if we count coffee as a food) and those who consume it. As we explain, prior to the fair-trade movement, farmers has little if any information about the quality (and therefore the real value) of their products.

So please listen to the conversation in which we explore these connections; for those who have not given much to how high quality is achieved in coffee or why it matters, I think we provide a worthwhile introduction. As we explain in our discussion, an important aspect of improving coffee quality is the selection of better-quality coffee at various stages. From picking the coffee through roasting it, the best beans can be separated to get increasingly high-scoring results in the cup (coffee is scored much like wine).

Mild spoiler alert: I went looking for an image like this on
Instagram while watching one of the videos below. I should
not have been surprised that the first good example I found
was posted by the same person! It is part of a series of slides that
presents his case about microlots in a different way.

But please note that my co-presenter Mike Mowry begins to explain the problems that can arise from a focus on microlots, which are at the far end of the quality distribution. Microlots are very small batches of coffee -- perhaps just a couple of 100-pound bags -- that have been cultivated, selected, and processed with great care. They have the potential to earn premiums far above the price of ordinary coffee, and even more than most specialty coffee.

My co-presenter Mike Mowry begins to explain this during our conversation, and afterwards he shared two videos from Colombia that explain why high quality being good does not mean that extremely high quality is better. In two segments that are part of a series of videos about coffee economics on the Cedro Alto Coffee channel, Karl Weinhold explains the math of microlots and how that math tends to work against farmers, and especially farmer cooperatives. Hint: it is not simply a matter of only a few farmers getting the premium prices; even those getting the premiums might not fare well overall.




To be honest,  I had not thought seriously about the potential downside of microlots until we began to prepare for our presentation.  I remember the thrill of visited a mill specializing in microlots during my January 2018 visit to Estelí, Nicaragua. For a coffee nerd who cares about the farmers, the land, and the cup, it was exhilarating. So learning about the potential downside of ultrahigh quality was sobering.

Africa-bed drying of microlots in Estelí, Nicaragua. These beans are being
dried with extraordinary care, in lots as small as 5 pounds (nanolots).

Lagniappe

Long before I knew anything about quality in coffee, I read and re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1). Much of the book concerns Robert Pirsig's maddening (literally) pursuit of the meaning of the word "quality." The rest of the book concerns a long ride on a motorcycle.

Coffeeland as Empire

I had already begun to read Augutine Sedgewick's hefty tome Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug when a fellow geographer passed along Oliver Taslik's much more manageable review, The callous roots of caffeine capitalism.

Taslik confirms my impression that Sedgewick's work has a great tendency to wander and meander across time and space, making me feel a bit better about already having gotten a little bit lost in its pages. He also reminds us that the James Hill -- the "One Man" of the book's subtitle -- is not the real subject of the book.

Rather, it is the broader story of the hazards of economic and social -- and political -- development that is dependent on a single crop. Diversification to other crops is scarcely better, if they remain within a narrow range and share post-colonial patterns of dependency.

I hope to have more to say on the work when I reach its end, and I hope some day to reach El Salvador itself -- a country I have studied a fair bit but not yet visited.

Lagniappe

Those who know me well may notice that the title of this book is very similar to a word I use often -- Coffeelands -- as a term of endearment for all of the places around the world that provide our coffee, and to the people of those lands. It is also the name of one of my very favorite coffee shops, whose owner has been with me on three coffeelands journeys (so far).

Coffee Readiness

We not only survived the 2012 Zombie Apocalypse in Livermore Falls; we got the zombies to wash our van. 

GQ is a font of wisdom on all kinds of subjects, so it should not be surprising that writer Cam Wolf has written about a serious matter of disaster preparedness: what about coffee?

He interviews a number of survivalists who make some interesting arguments about the value of coffee in an emergency, not only for its direct benefits in terms of energy and comfort, but also for its potential value as a tradable commodity. As cigarettes are to the prison yard, so coffee would be to extended off-grid survival.

Sudden Coffee cupping lab.
ostensibly.

As someone who was marketing combat and humanitarian rations in the period leading up to the Y2K scare, I know that long-term shelf stability is a key to such preparations. Otherwise, "preppers" (as Wolf calls them) would need to replenish their supply kits as often as they go to the grocery store. For this reason, they focus on freeze-dried coffee, though they claim to have found one that is substantially better than -- maybe even better than -- fresh-brewed coffee.

Sudden Coffee is "beloved among coffee snobs," according to Wolf, and employs an actual barista champion, according to the company web site. The involvement of Umeko Motoyoshi in "each step" of the process notwithstanding, I am very skeptical that any amount of care in the brewing process would allow the quality of coffee to remain intact through lyophilization and extended storage. I am also skeptical of coffee companies that claim to be trading directly but that provide no transparency about their sources.

The Sudden Coffee web site claims to offer "free" samples for the cost of shipping, but the online interface turns the sample order into a monthly subscription for that would provide instant coffee at a cost of $3 a cup! Thanks but no thanks. If I were a more cynical Coffee Maven, I might surmise that the entire GC article is simply part of a ruse to drive customers to this overpriced offer.

Wolf bolsters his claim by noting that humans and coffee originated in the same place, disregarding the millions of years it took for one to discover the other. Still, I certainly agree that coffee matters, and suggest a less costly approach for those who wish to hunker down in java readiness.

Once coffee is harvested, milled, and dried, it is generally considered shelf-stable for periods of two years or more.  Coffees with extremely refined flavor notes will lose some of those notes more quickly, but the vast majority of coffees are fine for several years once their internal moisture has gotten to the 11-13 percent range. I buy really good green coffee for the equivalent of 10 to 20 cents per cup, and roast it as I need it. My roasting is not expert, but it is so fresh that the result is still better than any coffee I can buy in my town.

Assuming there is a way to get fire and clean water in the apocalypse -- two rather bold assumptions -- a preparation kit that included a French press, a cast-iron skillet, and 10 to 20 pounds of green coffee could keep a survivor going for months. And for those interested in having something valuable to trade, a couple hundred bucks invested with Deans Beans could be worth thousands in a land overrun by zombies.

The Future is African

My favorite librarian used an excerpt from novelist Chimamanda Adichie's very popular TED Talk as part of a presentation she was giving on religious literacy. In it, she describes the narrow lens of pity through which many -- including middle-class Africans -- view the continent and its people.

We both found that medium is truly the message in this case, in that she has much more to teach us than the avoidance of stereotypes about Africa. Millions of viewers seem to agree.

We also recommend her novel Americanah, especially the audio version.

But her story about stereotypes of Africa is timely, as the Washington Post has recently published an essay on the topic by Salih Booker and Ari Rickman of the Center for International Policy. In The future is African — and the United States is not prepared, they describe demographic and economic trends that will surprise many readers.

Africa is often described as though it were a single country -- although it comprises 55 countries, depending on exactly which island countries are counted -- with 1,216,000,000 people at last count. One of every six people on the planet lives in Africa -- compared to 1 of 23 in the United States -- and the share in Africa will continue to grow grow for the rest of the lives of everyone reading this post. Not only does Africa exist in the North American imagination as a single, pitiable country, but that country is often portrayed as the land of a single tree.

To the extent that the United States government is prepared to interact with the continent's 55 countries at all, it is primarily through an infrastructure that is overwhelmingly military. Opportunities for diplomatic and commercial connections pale in comparison, creating a gap that China has been more than content to fill.

The diplomatic presence in Africa is indeed insufficient, but it is not completely absent. One very positive initiative is the Mandela/YALI Washington Fellowship program, established in 2014. Each summer since 2016, my university has participated, hosting 25 young professionals from more than a dozen countries of Africa for a six-week institute. I have enjoyed meeting the 50 previous BSU-based Fellows, many of whom I count among my friends. I look forward to visiting Fellows in a few different countries during my 2019 sabbatical!

Ethiopia

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was problematic, gutting many embassies and driving scores of career diplomats into early retirement. He was much more humane than his successor, though, and he spent his final hours in the job (before being ousted for something he did right) enjoying the role of top diplomat during a visit to Ethiopia.

Secretary Tillerson enjoying coffee in Ethiopia. Photo: Jonathan Ernst/AP Images

His visit, naturally, included ritual tastings of what is perhaps Ethiopia's greatest gift to the world: coffee. What Linnaeus dubbed "Arabica" should have, in fact, been called "Ethiopica" and Secretary Tillerson enjoyed some in a ceremony that goes back centuries.

Quinnipiac students from Ethiopia shared coffee and coffee knowledge at the fourth annual
Celebration of Coffee in Worcester, held for the first time at the
Worcester Public Library.

I had a similar privilege last October, when students from Ethiopia proudly shared their heritage at the fourth annual Celebration of Coffee in Worcester, Massachusetts. I enjoyed learning more about the coffee ceremony and drinking coffee from a cup identical to that used by Secretary Tillerson.

I am not certain which countries of Africa I will visit next year, but Ethiopia will certainly be one of them, in part because it is the origin of coffee as both a plant and a beverage and because one of the Mandela Fellows with whom I have maintained contact is an Ethiopian diplomat who can acquaint me with many other aspects of the country.

Good News from Gorongosa

The Film Notes page I created for my students provides a lot more detail about the film mentioned below, with links to resources related to specific things mentioned in the film. Feel free to use them while watching The Guide.

I share a lot of bad news on this blog, and here is a bit more: we have so damaged the planet that it is no longer sufficient to seek ways of avoiding further damage through minor efforts such as recycling bottles and cans. If the future is to be anything but bleak, we must engage in restoration, not merely protection.

But here is some good news: restoration is exactly what some people are doing, such as the people in and out of Mozambique who are restoring the Gorongosa National Park.

Our Vision from Gorongosa National Park on Vimeo.

People have lived in the Gorongosa area for 300,000 years -- 10,000 human generations. A little over a century ago, the need to protect it from overuse was recognized, and for most of the 20th Century its natural communities did benefit from preservation efforts.



In recent decades, however, war in Mozambique harmed and endangered both the natural communities of Gorongosa and the human communities closely connected to it. The Gorongosa timeline outlines the place's story from pre-history through colonization to protection and conflict.

Most recently, a positive story has emerged, as local and global people are working together to restore the park's ecosystems by healing its connections to surrounding human communities. The results include an ecotourism initiative that is much deeper than most, which is explored in The Guide, which is the story of the relationship between Gorongosa neighbor Tonga Torcida and the imminent biologist E.O. Wilson.

Global-local teamwork: Wilson & Torcida in The Guide.
(Link above is to Amazon Prime; it is also on YouTube, though perhaps slightly abridged.)

The global importance of the work in Gorongosa and in similar "ark" environments throughout the world was described by E.O. Wilson himself in the February 2002 article "The Bottleneck." (This link is to the Scientific American site where the issue can be purchased; the article is readily available in libraries as well).

When I started studying demographics in the 1980s, we were concerned that human population was experiencing exponential growth that was exhibiting a "J-curve" trajectory. That is, the compounding of population growth was leading to increases that seemed destined to accelerate for decades to come. Around the turn of this century, however, negative feedback processes began to slow that growth. A pattern that seemed to have no end in sight now seemed to have an end point -- a likely plateau of human population at around 9 or 10 billion in the middle of this century. This is known as "S-curve" or sigmoidal growth; we are currently in a long period of population that increases at a decreasing rates.

(Note: a year after this post, I wrote A Decreasing Increase to explain the above graph in more detail. It is a reality of demographic momentum that is difficult to grasp at first.)

For those concerned -- as we all should be -- about providing resources for the growing population, this is good news. It means that our task, though daunting, is not infinite. If we can find a way to support ourselves sustainably until 2050, we should be able to do so after that date. In The Bottleneck, Wilson makes a corollary claim -- any species and wild lands that we can protect until 2050 have a reasonable chance of being protected for the long term.

Update August 2019 (with links updated in 2022)

I watched the full version of The Guide documentary shortly after writing this post, and watched it again after I read a new story about coffee (see below) on the margins of the park. (The preceding link points to filmmaker notes, but no longer to the film itself; see the HHMI YouTube version to watch it.) The film is a welcome respite from the bad news that assails us daily. Not only does it offer hope and beauty, but it lets the viewer witness the rapidly growing friendship between an old New Englander and a young African -- two men from vastly different worlds who find they have a tremendous amount in common. Just try to get through 40 minutes without shedding any joyful tears!

Among the great treats -- E.O. Wilson had never been to sub-Saharan Africa before the age of 82, and yet is able to identify the genus and species of every critter brought to him by local kids -- except those previously unknown to science.

I hope to have the good fortune to visit this park some day. Because the history of colonization connects Mozambique to Brazil, I do speak the local language.

Lagniappe (Coffee-related)

Children taking a break in coffee fields near Gorongosa park. ABC's caption optimistically ignores the fact that these kids are probably participating in the harvest alongside their older relatives.

My well-known interest in all things related to the geography of coffee means that friends regularly forward stories to me that I might otherwise miss. Most recently, it was the coordinator of our campus study-abroad programs who shared Coffee growers help reforest Mozambique's Mount Gorongosa, a story by Andrew Meldrum by way of AP and CBS.

Although the photograph belies claims that the coffee is shade-grown, this is nonetheless a potentially positive story of environmental protection and community development; as The Guide makes clear, the two are intricately connected. The coffee trees themselves provide an important ecological service as a buffer between the carefully protected park itself and surrounding lands with no protection from hunting or clearing. 

The buffer effect is much greater -- and the coffee much better -- if genuine shade-grown methods are employed. I have sent a message to the person directing agricultural partnerships around the park, to see if he can provide more details about the coffee cultivation. Mozambique continues to be a very small producer of coffee, with the entire country growing less than some individual farms in other countries. For it to succeed as an economic-development project, the coffees of the Gorongosa region would need to be grown with attention to quality and perhaps distinct varietals. 

Coffee Catch-up

I sometimes start my coffee courses with this song, though this video rendition is new to me. It is included for sheer fun, and also because of a pun that works between the lyrics and the title of this post.

As a compulsive blogger, I sometimes have waaaay too many tabs open on my computer, and right now several of them have to do with coffee. Taking the time to blog about each one would be a great way to procrastinate on other tasks, but I am choosing to employ the original meaning of blog a "web log" or simple listing of interesting sites encountered while browsing.

So with minimal commentary, here are a few disparate articles that have caught my attention recently.

Writing for Bloomberg, Marvin Perez explains how the climate-stoked roya fungus threatens organic coffee. This article is an excellent introduction to an issue that concerns many of my friends in Central America and should concern anybody interested in coffee and climate justice.

The blog PHYS.ORG summarizes a new report on the mapping of the coffee genome, which has interesting implications for understanding the role of caffeine as both an attractor of pollinators and a repellant for insect pests. I understood about 3/4 of this article, so I have shared it with colleagues in chemistry and biology with whom I have been in increasingly specific discussions of interdisciplinary undergraduate research on coffee and caffeine.

Writing for Serious Eats, coffee pundit Nick Cho describes how to make the best French-press coffee at home. I was going to write a whole piece explaining a couple of ways to improve on his advice, but this tab has been open forever, so I'll just share and move on. Except to mention that if your kitchen is cold, you should wrap a towel around the carafe as it brews, and that you can experiment a bit with brew times and grinds until you find what makes the coffee perfect for you. Starting with excellent coffee and grinding it for each preparation are given, of course.

Also open on my computer for a long time has been NY Times blogger Jon Grinspan's fascinating explanation of how coffee fueled the Civil War.

Finally -- and I did write that this is a disparate assortment -- Boston University graduates have created Coffee, a social-networking app for users of Apple mobile devices who are seeking employment. I do not have such a device and am not seeking employment, but among my students and alumni who might use this app, some are true coffee experts. My estimation of the app will be how well it helps them find coffee-related employment!

Coffee Harmony

I try to learn something new about coffee every day, and I usually get my wish because nearly everybody in my life knows this about me. I had missed a very interesting article about another professor in the Boston area whose work has led him to coffee, but fortunately a friend brought the remarkable story to me, and I have already had the chance to share it with some of my students.

In Ugandan Beans Brew Taste, Tolerance, Boston Globe journalist Andrea Pyenson describes how the work of Tufts University rabbi and professor Jeffrey Summit led him from studying the music of the Mbale region to working with them on interfaith community-building through coffee. A Ugandan friend was visiting the rabbi in September 2001, and ended up being in New York City on September 11. Deciding to work toward peace in his own community, he helped to build a coffee cooperative of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish growers. The coffee is available in several variations from Thanksgiving Coffee, and Rabbi Summit has written the liner notes for Delicious Peace -- a CD on which the community tells its story through music. Thanks to the quick work of the US Postal Service, my students and I enjoyed both the coffee and the music just a few days after I read the Globe article. Both were delicious!

Various purchase options for the music and the coffee are on the Delicious Peace Smithsonian page, which also includes detailed liner notes.

Lagniappe
Ordering this delicious coffee supports peace-building while rewarding the buyer and any guests who might get to enjoy it. Ordering from Thanksgiving Coffee also provides an excuse to buy a package of the world-famous maracatura produced by my dear friend Byron Corrales in Nicaragua.

Nuts Have a Geography, Too

Some people assume that coffee is the only commodity that has my attention, and it is true that I have more than a passing interest in the beverage, and especially in the lands and peoples responsible for the bean that is the second-most traded commodity in the world (oil being the first).

I use geography to teach about coffee and coffee to teach about geography, though, and many of the lessons of this agricultural commodity are applicable to many others. I am very proud that my daughter recognized this recently, when she excitedly shared


The Luckiest Nut in the World from Emily James on Vimeo.

Just as a coffee bean is not a bean, a peanut is not a nut, nor is a ground nut. We learn from this film that at one time, ground nuts were the leading export of the country of Senegal. As Paloma rightly concluded, an economy dependent on a food staple that she had never heard of was probably not a very prosperous economy.

This brilliant and engaging little film deftly describes the ways in which dependence on commodities keeps some countries at the periphery of the world economy indefinitely, and how the manipulation of the rules that govern trade reinforce the core-periphery dichotomy.

The entire tale is told from the point of view of an all-American peanut, a self-reflective character that gradually comes to understand his position of privilege relative to the ground nuts, cashews, and Brazil nuts of Senegal, Mozambique, and Bolivia, respectively. (Most Brazil nuts grow in Bolivia! Who knew?)

In its very funny way, this film provides an education in political economy over the space of a typical sit-com episode. Emily James uses this jaunty peanut to explain the many ways in which the system that looks like a free-trade, even playing field is actually manipulated in important ways, each to the disadvantage of farmers in developing countries. Understanding the prevalence of distorted markets is the first step toward fairness in trade.

Elsewhere on this blog, I have mentioned three other important -- and generally entertaining resources for learning more. Most entertaining and relevant, perhaps, is King Corn, which describes the incredibly contrived market in corn. Policies that make corn profitable for U.S. farmers and cheap for U.S. consumers are not just bad for the federal budget; they make life difficult for farmers around the world.

In my Cups and Summits post, I describe the other two films -- Black Gold and The Girl in the Cafe -- that tell other aspects of the story. Though one is a documentary and the other a feature film, both provide behind-the-scenes looks into the process that makes "free trade" agreements anything but free.

Busmoor's Holiday

The term "busman's holiday" frequently comes to mind when I take any kind of a vacation, because the line between what I enjoy in my time off and what I do as a professional geographer is often blurred. It is far from a bad thing, though: if walking in the woods with with my family -- for example -- reminds me of something related to my work, I have chosen my work well, and am fortunate to have it.

My latest "Sombra" photo. I took the first first against a coffee backdrop in 2011,
when comparisons were made to the famous
"Shadow" statue of Sandino in Managua.

Twice in a fortnight, this precise example has played out. As with a walk on the Lexington rail trail two weeks ago, this morning's brief adventure in the Cape Cod moors reminded me of ongoing work I am doing with students, related to the development of the Nunckatassett portion of the Bay Circuit Trail. This weekend, the insights came as we walked through the Seabury Farm Conservation Area in Barnstable, at the recommendation of our hosts at the Lamb & Lion Inn. Equally inviting would have been the trails of an Audubon property directly behind the inn (and facing Cape Cod Bay, except that we had a canine companion with us, who is precluded by the Audubon management plan. The admissibility of dogs is an important consideration in any open-space management, and this area of Barnstable now has ample public land in both the dog and non-dog category.

When Pam and I -- and our doglet Perry -- stepped into the scene above, I exclaimed "The Moors!" as I was reminded of the upland grasslands of Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles (though our min-pin is neither a hound nor very Baskervillian). On further discussion, we found that we each had different definition of "moor," all of which were substantiated by quick Google searches and -- more importantly -- by the Oxford English Dictionary. We learned that it can mean a highland open space, especially if covered with heather, a swamp, or any uncultivated land. We also learned that "moor" in the ecological sense has an etymology that is completely separate from the word "Moor" relating to people of North Africa.

In some contexts, "moor" refers specifically to areas reserved for shooting (that is, hunting), which is the case on this property we were walking in Barnstable. In Massachusetts, hunting is allowed on public lands unless specifically prohibited, subject to certain set-backs in distance from roads and buildings. As we consider the development of trails through public lands in Bridgewater, this is an important subject to understand, as it is in any place experience rapid suburban sprawl. Newcomers are sometimes surprised to see hunters close to their homes, and long-timers are sometimes surprised to find that the places where they hunted in their youth are now off-limits. In this context, the signage used above can be a vital part of managing public trails. The photo includes another essential element of trail management, which is to identify the right level of vehicular access, and to find ways to achieve it that meet the various management objectives at a site.

I noticed this house as we were about to exit the property, along what is known as Aunt Hatch's Lane. This house was clearly in place before the recent designation of the surrounding land as public open space. In many similar situations -- I do not know whether this case is one of them -- public space becomes accessible only if access is provided across private lands. In such cases, tax benefits may accrue (a major topic in my course), along with a sense of serving the public good. It is also quite often the case that the value of this kind of property actually increases, despite the potential loss of privacy, because of its proximity to protected lands. In fact, some argue -- not without justification -- that land protection is often purused specifically as a way of protecting property values. It is certainly the case that many Massachusetts towns with a high proportion of public land also have extraordinarily high property values.

I named the photo above "buffer" because the value of the property is further enhanced by a thick growth of vegetation on a steep slope, separating it both visually and physically from the public way.

Aside from good exercise, a major reason to spend time in the out-of-doors is to appreciate its aesthetic beauty, and I was fortunate that Pam noticed the above "still life" along the trail's edge. It is good always to have an eye open for such encounters.

I look forward to hiking this property again, when I'm prepared for a longer exploration of the "Amazon Trail" just to the south of the area we explored. I am intrigued by its name, since it was the Amazon that got me into geography in the first place!

View Larger Map

Back to that Audubon property: we got no farther than the train tracks, which of course we know not to walk along, tempting though it be. The night before our walk, we noticed the Cape Cod Dinner Train, which we had enjoyed riding last year. This section of track is near the one low overpass along Route 6A, a quaint -- if treacherous -- crossing that I have admired since my first visit to the Cape many years ago.

Lexington Trail

A few years ago, I noticed that an extraordinary agglomeration of coffee shops was to be found in the center of the town of Lexington (that place west of Boston where the set-to with the British started). Service-oriented businesses of this kind are very interesting; although Christaller's Central Place Theory would normally suggest just one of each kind of service in a small center, it sometimes occurs that a positive effect arises from the agglomeration of several, seemingly competing, businesses.

View Larger Map
In the case of Lexington, both coffee shops and bicycle shops (and one combined coffee/bicycle shop!) enjoy the benefits of being a destination that attracts more than the expected number of customers.

Many factors may contribute to a thriving downtown, and the general prosperity of the region certainly contributes. Lexington is one of several contiguous communities with the highest incomes and housing prices in Massachusetts, which in turn is among the highest states on both measures. Massachusetts also has an exceptionally heterogeneous landscape, though, with field, forest, water, and built environments closely intermingled. In this context, the carefully configured confluence of transportation systems is vitally important.

As my own town -- with some help from some of my geography students -- works toward the improvement of local trail networks, I am sharing a few observations from a short walk in Lexington yesterday, with my favorite librarian and our somewhat crazy dog. This is not so much a photoessay as an Instagram assortment, but it does have a few lessons for anyone thinking about trails in their own neighborhood.

The Lexington Depot houses the Lexington Historical Society.
It is also a convenient place to stow bikes, under a nice canopy.
Because the railroad went through the station, so does
the Minuteman Commuter Bikeway.

These old sidings are a reminder that the main trail is formed in the old rail bed. The United States reached a peak of railroad miles around 1910, with a steady decrease ever since. This means that throughout the country are many miles of potential paths, already graded for easy riding, and with ownership or easements that facilitate connections that would cost a fortune to make through new land purchases. As the Minuteman Trail makes clear, these paths are also wide enough to accommodate emergency vehicles.

One reason that trail projects can be successful is that while they combine recreation, the enjoyment of natural and historic areas, they also have economic benefits. Hit and Run Sports and Games is an excellent example of a business well-suited to bicycle-oriented development. Accessible from both the street and the trail -- with a hand-made sign listing some of its wares -- this is youth-oriented business is ideally situated. 

ACROSS Lexington uses both the commuter path and other lines of connectivity to bring together the entire town, as the long version of its name implies: Accessing Conservation land, Recreation areas, Open space, Schools and Streets in Lexington. We found this marker just off the rail trail -- it helps residents and visitors alike to know and appreciate what is in this community.

Here Pam and our microdog head toward the one thing that every town should have: a public visitor's center. Easily reached by foot, bike, car, and bus, this center provides rest rooms, respite, and information -- a low-cost investment in civility and marketing that benefits residents, visitors, and local businesses alike.

Coffee for Chemists

By a cosmic coffee coincidence, Javatrekker and aspiring comic Dean Cycon released this video just as I was preparing to address the annual meeting of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers, which was hosted by our BSU chemists last week. I had not worked with this group before, but rightly surmised that this would be a good way to open my presentation. I post it here for the benefit of those NEACT participants who might wish to share it, along some of the other resources I presented that evening.

(Prior to the talk on coffee, I mentioned two other resources that might be of interest to anybody involved in education in New England, especially southern New England. These are the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History, which can put together an educational program on any subject and our own EarthView outreach program.)

As Dean points out in the video itself, of course, the pesticides associated with "conventional coffee" are in reality no laughing matter. Many chemicals we have banned in the United States are routinely used on the coffee -- and other products we import from around the world. In real life, Dean sets an extraordinary example, and I was able to offer the teachers a choice of his No CO2 and Decaf Chiapas coffees. Each of these single-origin selections gave us a chance to discuss some environmental chemistry, related to carbon offsets and caffeine removal, respectively. The byproduct of decaf coffee, by the way, is now marketed as "green coffee extract" by Starbucks -- coffee without the coffee flavor. Gadzooks.

Never mind the debates about whether traces of these nasties make their way into our cups: there is no denying that the barrage of chemicals sprayed on the coffee, sugar, flowers, oranges, and countless other tropical crops have profound effects on the ecosystems and communities from which we extract these bounties. As much fun as I have with coffee as a beverage and teaching tool, I remember that life-and-death questions really do surround its production.

Because the theme of this year's NEACT meeting was green chemistry, I put together an eclectic talk entitled "Greening Coffee: From Red to Green to Brown." That is, I provided a sampling of environmental choices at various stages of coffee production, from the growth of the plant (red berries) through the in-country processing (green coffee) to its roasting and brewing (brown beans or beverage).

This required a very brief overview of the roughly 50 steps from field to cup, which I summarized with the names that are typically used to describe coffee in Nicaragua. On the tree, the fruit is a cherry. Once picked, it is a grape. When peeled, the slimy seed is honey. When dried, it is parchment. When green, it is gold (because it can earn money). When roasted, it is a bean. When brewed, it is coffee.

I also mentioned the parts of the cherry that are separated at various stages, and an online quiz that I created for those who wish to learn these parts. A more advanced quiz teaches the geography of processing -- the locations in which each part of the coffee is typically removed through processing.

I discussed the geographic parameters that determine where coffee can be effectively grown, and I mentioned Coffee & Conservation, a marvelous resource on the relationship between coffee ecology and the habitat of migratory birds. Then, as an antidote to Dean's Mad Scientist, I shared the best example I know of coffee being produced in harmony with its surrounding ecology -- the biodynamic production of my friend Byron, the Poet of Coffee.This video also provides a nice transition from the coffee grower to the importer and roaster, who also have the opportunity to make important decisions about the environmental impacts of the coffee.



An interesting development at the roasting stage is the growing interest in solar roasting, a growing field in which Solar Roast Coffee of Colorado seems to be a leader. As roasting coffee on our campus continues to be an elusive goal, we might actually have an opportunity to do some relevant roof-top research.

I talked about brewing not in terms of environmental impact so much as flavor impact. Flavor is important, however, as brewing coffee properly honors the work of those who have put tremendous care into producing it. Moreover, the more consumers learn to appreciate good coffee, the more likely are farmers to be fairly compensated for their work and talent. Rather than discuss my approach to brewing in detail, I mentioned one brewing method that is favored by industry experts and was invented by a chemist in Springfield, Massachuetts: the Chemex coffeemaker.

And even though most of the audience members were (I presume) going to be spending the night away from their romantic partners, I ended the presentation with Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of the sultry song Black Coffee and reference to the work of Lavazza and others on a different kind of coffee chemistry that is explored in some depth on my (PG-13) Coffee & Tea Romance page.

No Place for Meaning

The United States is entering the final stages of a presidential race that -- in my view -- will be a referendum on the value of work. Quite honestly, I fear that racism may provide the margin of victory for a vision of labor that will forever diminish the lives of workers of all races and all but the most rarefied economic classes.

The View from Lazy Point -- Carl Safina's sweeping exploration of the gap between our conventional ways of thinking about the world and the challenges we face as a human race -- includes the following passage about how we have come to value work. One presidential candidate has built his fortune on a much different view, but the following really captures my own view of what business can and should be. This passage bears careful reading, for its examination of the unraveling of work, family, commerce, democracy, and thought itself.

In my town, the Sou'wester Bookstore is no more, Rudy the druggist and his wife are holding on by their fingernails, and the youngish couple who've bought the hardware store are clearly worried. These are true men and women in the best sense of the word "business." they are enterprising threads in the fabric of our community, not just commuters who drive away in the morning and appear only behind their lawn mower and their trash cans. When I enter a local store and the bell above the door rings, I know I will be welcomed by name and the shopkeeper and I will trade something valuable.

That's why for their sakes and mine, I do my shopping on this side of the tracks when I can. This gets increasingly difficult as the mall-and-chain drags real businesses and real people to exhaustion. By so dreadfully shrinking opportunities for people to go into business for themselves, the chains keep people acting as their stockboys and salesgirls well beyond the time they should have taken their place as adults in our communities. The middle-aged workers in the big-box stores seem like elderly teenagers, deprived of authority, creativity, responsibility, and pride. Mostly, they're nice people with a desire to be helpful. What could they have accomplished if given a chance? They may never understand who they are; they'll certainly never know who they might have been. Open on holidays, the chains undermine tehir employees' time for family. (Why anyone is actually shopping for TVs and washing machines on Thanksgiving is a question so large its answer eludes the wide, wide net of even my own cynicism.) Thus the chain stores threaten family more than any same-sex marriage, threaten Sunday more than Darwin ever could. Seeing my island in chans has driven me to the fringes, made me a castaway on my own native shores, a refugee inside my homeland. And for that I thank them. In that banal way, they helped me understand, at least, who I am not.

Though the shopping mall has largely driven Main Street out of business by usurping its commercial intercourse, it rejects Main Street's civic discourse. A friend reports tha in his nearby megamall, people handing out anti-war leaflets were arrested. Free speech has no place on "private property"; it could distract those in the consumer caste from tehir main task and sole worth. Just keep the lite jazz playin'. A generation or so ago -- one tends to forget -- those same people were citizens in a democracy. (Safina, 306-307)

I would quickly add that the poverty of opportunity Safina identifies is a loss of meaningful work not only for the potential owners of small businesses, but also those who could contribute so much more to their communities as employees of local business than they can as employees of distant investors and speculators.

Sadly, educational institutions often contribute to the growth of McJobs described above, as they outsource much of the employment that is available on their campuses. As I explain in my Guru, Inc. post, this is partly the result of ever-shrinking public support for public education. In such circumstances, creative thinking is required if we are to provide education by both word and example, and to have critical thinking removed even from the seats of learning.

Photo: Zohaa Basra

The busy coffee shop shown above is at at Stetson University. It is not an ideal situation -- the workers are employed by Sodexo rather than by the university itself. But they are employed, and they work in an environment that is varied and interesting and that -- most importantly -- allows them to participate meaningfully with the students and faculty at that university.

Vending machines humming along 24/7 in a space between a state-of-the
art bottle filler and a vacant space that could employ actual people
to serve food. Some sort of cafe will eventually be in place for peak hours,
but those vending machines are proving VERY difficult to remove.

Meanwhile, at my own university, a proposal to create an even more dynamic work place languishes. A space designated for a cafe remains empty, but the space immediately behind it already "employs" vending machines -- a reserve army of mechanized food service that stands ready to disemploy human labor, even as it consumes enormous amounts of electricity and plastic packaging. 

The vending machines remind me of the looms that were the targets of the original Luddite movement two hundred years ago, but with added environmental demerits. Given the confluence of environmental destruction and rampant unemployment in this Luddite bicentennial year, people are re-examining the relationships among technology, labor, and the environment. 

Many of the original Luddites were executed -- some for crimes against other humans, but more for their crimes against machines. Yes, even in the early decades of the industrial revolution, the state sided with capital, and quickly made the destruction of a loom a hanging offense.


It is easy to dismiss those who try to defend the interests of labor over capital, tagging them as "Luddites" opposed to progress. But just as the original Chipko tree-huggers were loggers who resisted the pace and scope of logging in India, modern critics of "creative destruction" call into question the pace of disemployment and the breach of social contracts. When official unemployment is 8 percent, real unemployment 14 percent, and youth unemployment closer to 75 percent, it is time to take a serious look at the choices we make, both as individuals and as institutions.

SEXCoffee

What else is there to say? SEXCoffee is a Providence-based band that recorded a promotional video at Supreme Coffee & Donuts in Seekonk, MA. Oddly, the video has a low-volume Chuck Berry audio track, but the band itself seems to have an edgier sound.

Cafe: Private or Public Space

Image: Edwin's Cafe in East Harlem

Yet again, "Dear Abby" is fodder for this blog. Because I have given a lot of thought to the geography of coffee shops, I see the third letter in yesterday's Dear Abby column as a good starting point for some geographic ruminations.

DEAR ABBY: Once a week I meet with three friends at a coffee shop/restaurant. We sit for at least an hour chatting and catching up about our families. I'm the only one in the group who orders anything, and it's usually just a beverage. It makes me uncomfortable that no one else orders and we take up the table for an hour. This has gone on for a while, and I have not found a way to say anything. Can you help? -- FRIEND IN SACRAMENTO

DEAR FRIEND: If the owner or manager of the place objected to the fact that you are taking up the table, something would have been said by now, or a notice would have been printed stating that customers must place a minimum order per person. However, because you feel awkward being the only person having something, tell your friends how you feel and that you'd feel more comfortable if they ordered something, too.

In this case, writer "FRIEND" grasps something important that Abby does not. Coffee shops and restaurants are private spaces, and recovering the rent on those spaces is a very important part of keeping the shops profitable. The owner of a coffee shop is often literally paying rent, often on a square-foot basis, to a property owner. Even if the cafe and its real estate are owned by the same person, the prevailing rent is an important benchmark, since a business that does not meet that rent could presumably be replaced by some other use that does.

Although the land rent is described on an square-foot basis averaged over the entire establishment, it can be refined to differentiate the value of spaces within the shop. The counter space immediately next to the cash register, for example, usually has a particularly high rent value, which is why high-turnover, impulse items are usually placed there.

The writer intrinsically understands that the tables have a rent value, and that a single beverage at a table for four is literally not paying the rent. I can think of several reasons that the management has not responded, none of which make the behavior of this group acceptable. It could be, for example, that these visits take place at an off-peak time, when the "rent" of the table is lower. It could also be that this cafe -- like many that offer wifi -- errs on the side of accommodation, taking the occasional loss in return for some gains overall. Everyone involved, however, should consider this question: would the space be available for these weekly gatherings if every customer brought along three free riders?

In this blog, I frequently write about the value and importance of public spaces and resources, so my defense of private property in this case might seem incongruous. Quite the contrary: the writer and her friends clearly need to take their activities either to a more private space (i.e., their homes) or a truly public space, like a park. By treating this private space as a public space, they contribute a bit to its demise.

Coffee & Climate change

As most people who know me already know, I use coffee to teach geography, and geography to teach coffee. Murray Carpenter's report from the World Coffee Conference in Guatemala (sadly, I was not there), does exactly what I strive for: it uses coffee as a lesson on climate change.

When I visit coffee farms in Nicaragua, I am sometimes asked, "What are you doing about climate change?" As Carpenter's story points out, the mountains are pointy, so going up is not necessarily an option. And coffee requires a great deal of specialized knowledge, hard work, and patience. So even if a changing climate results in suitable microclimates in new locations, good coffee will not automatically follow.

M*A*S*H and Coffee

I enjoy films. A lot. I had the good fortune of taking a Brazilian cinema course in graduate school, from which I learned that I could learn a lot while enjoying movies. I assign films to my students, and I have created a modest page of favorite films.

Just recently, I realized that I should create a separate page for films related to coffee and tea. The page includes documentaries and a few film and television favorites. The first of these is M*A*S*H (the series, not the film), because references to bad coffee arise frequently. One of Major Houlihan's most memorable lines, in fact, relates to coffee.

Readers of this blog are invited to post some of their favorite coffee references. Please use the "comments" link to share, and include the season and episode if you have it handy. M*A*S*H is the only television series for which my family has the complete boxed set, so we will enjoy looking up the references. (See the episode guide on TV.com for some assistance.)

Dinero al Norte

Thanks to my colleague Vernon for pointing me to Marc Lacey's fascinating NY Times cover article about impoverished families in southern Mexico struggling to send money north to their relatives in the United States. Although the trend Lacey describes remains relatively small, this story is relevant to many key facets of migration between Latin America and the United States.

As I write this, I am enjoying a cup of decaf coffee from Chiapas, the home state of some of the families mentioned in the article. Although the article does not mention coffee, it is an important part of the background. People continue to leave coffee-growing areas because prices fluctuate between low and lower, so that even people who own their own land often work as virtual slaves. Since people in this position are not often represented at "free" trade negotiations, their options become fewer year by year. Nobody should complain about "illegal" immigration before thoroughly understanding these dynamics, because the "legal" and "just" are divergent concepts. The same process is unfolding in coffeelands throughout the world; see these examples from Oaxaca and Chiapas, and know that a similar story is behind every cup of conventional coffee sold.

Back to the NY Times story: It was first brought to my attention when we were discussing the exodus of Brazilians from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. As the U.S. dollar has weakened, many who moved to Massachusetts in order to bring or send money back to Brazil have decided to leave. In many cases, these have been middle-class Brazilians who saw coming to this region for a year or two as an expedient way to earn money to invest in a business or a nicer home in Brazil. When the U.S. economy weakened, many of these folks found their way back home, revealing the extent to which some sectors of the Massachusetts economy had become dependent upon them.

The case in Mexico is similar in some ways, except that the migrants tend to be much poorer, and the ability to move back and forth is much reduced. An ironic consequence of the poorly-conceived border wall is that crossing once is so risky that people will remain in the U.S. who in previous years might have gone home. As Lacey points out, this is not an option for people who have risked everything for a chance to earn money in the North.

For some families of Oaxaca and Chiapas, the result of these current absurdities is that undocumented workers in the richest country in the world are receiving small payments from some of the poorest people in Mexico, hoping to keep them in place until the economy improves. Eventually, they hope, the work that U.S. citizens usually eschew will be available to them once again, and the remittances will resume their usual pattern.